Thomas Edison | Alexander Bell | Eli Whitney

ELI WHITNEY

Inventor of the Cotton Gin

http://web.mit.edu/invent/www/inventorsR-Z/whitney.html

(1) Conditions at the time of the invention- 1792

The southern states of the USA had once grown rich on tobacco, rice, and cheap slave labor.

But now…

• The soil is exhausted, tobacco is in over supply, and slavery is on the decline.
• Most plantations growing cotton are nearly bankrupt. Plantation owners experiencing difficulty support slaves.
• It takes 20 hours of hard work to produce 1 kilogram of cotton

There are 6 slave states

(2) Problem Solved By The Invention

Cotton must be separated from its seeds in order to be made into cotton cloth. Long- staple cotton, which was easy to separate from its seeds, could only be grown along the coast. The one variety of cotton that grew inland had sticky green seeds that were time-consuming to pick out of the fluffy white bolls. Although there existed machines that could clean the seeds out of long-staple cotton, there were no machines that could clean the seeds out of the more abundantly available short-staple cotton. The Eli Whitney cotton gin solved this problem.

(3) Impact of Inventing the Cotton Gin in 1793

Slavery is given a new life. Slavery is virtually guaranteed to live on indefinitely.

-One slave can now do the work of 50

-Cotton becomes the most important product in the world.

-Cotton growing becomes so profitable that it greatly increases the demand for land and slaves

-Cotton becomes the basis of the South's very profitable agricultural economy

1790-1808 Southerners import approximately 80,000 African slaves.

1808- Congress bans the importation of slaves from Africa

1850- America is growing 3 quarters of the worlds cotton. It is shipped primarily to
New England and England

1860- Slavery has spread. The number of slave states is now equal to 15!!!!!

1861- American Civil War starts

1863- President Lincoln frees the slaves

1865- The South loses the war, slavery is over

http://www.nara.gov/education/cc/whitney.html
Picture of us government patent

http://www-adm.pdx.edu/user/frinq/pluralst/cgin.htm
Photograph of the Cotton Gin

http://www.nps.gov/ncro/anti/emancipation.html
Emancipation Proclamation- President Lincoln frees the slaves

More Eli Whitney History

The third best known American inventor of the pre-atomic age, after Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell, is probably Eli Whitney. Whitney certainly transformed the economies of the antebellum North and South. But among invention aficionados, his invention of the cotton gin is a matter of some dispute.
Whitney was born in Westboro, Massachusetts in 1765. As a child, he showed an instinct and talent for machinery. He worked as a blacksmith, and invented a nail-making machine. Whitney's dream of attending Yale College was frustrated for some years, because no college then taught or much appreciated the "useful arts." But Whitney did attend Yale, and graduated at the age of 27, only to find that there were no jobs for engineers either. So he accepted a teaching position in South Carolina.

En route, in early 1793, Whitney was befriended by Katherine Greene, the widow of a Revolutionary War general. When Whitney's teaching job later fell through, Greene invited him to stay at her plantation, Mulberry Grove, where she thought he might make himself helpful. As Whitney soon discovered, most cotton plantations were then on the brink of insolvency, because "green seed" cotton, the only strain that would grow inland, took too long to cull from its seeds. To sift out a single "point" of cotton lint from its surrounding seeds required ten hard hours of hand labor.

Everyone agreed that the solution was a machine to do this work; but no one had been able to make one. According to legend, within ten days of his arrival Whitney had observed the manual process and built a machine that did the same thing much faster. It is clear that his very first model did not work. In it, the bulk cotton was pressed against a wire screen, which held back the seeds while wooden teeth jutting out from an adjacent rotating drum teased the cotton fibers out through the mesh. This model invariably jammed. The next version was a complete success, thanks to thin wire hooks replacing the wooden teeth, and a moving brush that constantly cleared away the collected fibers.

By all accounts, Greene encouraged Whitney. The vexed question is whether the key element, the wire hooks, was his idea or hers. Greene supporters cite the claim of a friend of a friend of her plantation foreman, that Greene invoked "a woman's wit" and told Whitney to replace his wooden pegs with the wires of a fireplace cleaning brush. Whitney supporters cite a letter to the editor of Southern Agriculturalist magazine, whose author heard from admittedly shadowy sources that Whitney had explicitly asked Greene for a pin to experiment with at the start of his efforts. (Note that for some time during his Massachusetts days, Whitney had been the New World's sole manufacturer of hatpins.)

Whatever the comparative contributions, the cotton gin ("gin" is simply short for "engine") was a stupendous success. After Whitney gave a one-hour demonstration, in which the machine did the day's work of many men, farmers raced to sow their fields with green seed cotton. As the cotton grew, Whitney's workshop was broken into and his machine was examined in detail: soon, copies were everywhere. Whitney could not possibly have manufactured one tenth of the gins that that first crop would require; but it is nonetheless unfair that his patent (granted in 1794) guaranteed him only ten years of legal battles, which ended in penury.

In 1804, Whitney left the South forever, disappointed and disgusted. In his words, "An invention can be so valuable as to be worthless to the inventor." In fact, Whitney never attempted to patent any of his later inventions (for example, a milling machine). But after settling in New Haven, Connecticut, Whitney re-invented American manufacturing as a whole, through mass production.

Whitney wanted to enable unskilled laborers to make complex products. He managed this by designing products (his test case was rifles) with interchangeable parts. These were cut and shaped by machines that each performed one precise function over and over again. The workers would merely put each machine through its motions.

Mass production is not a romantic notion. But it allowed for an unprecedented boom in American industry, and eventually provided employment for thousands of workers who were unwilling or unable to acquire apprenticeships in skilled crafts. And by all accounts, Eli Whitney himself treated his "manufactory" workers with appreciation and respect: the awful abuses of laborers that came about after his death in 1825 were a perversion of his system.

http://web.mit.edu/invent/www/inventorsR-Z/whitney.html

http://www.nara.gov/education/cc/whitney.html
Picture of patent

http://members.aol.com/~ntgen/baldwin/whit_eli.html

http://www.whitneygen.org/archives/biography/eli.html

Thomas Edison | Alexander Bell | Eli Whitney